Denuvo

Right now SEGA has been getting a lot of heat due to putting Denuvo DRM on Sonic Mania, if you google the DRM right now you will probably find a ton of Sonic Mania related articles. One thing that most people miss is that SEGA Europe’s PC games, like the Total War series have been using Denuvo for awhile. The newly released Total War: Warhammer II came out earlier today and has already had its Denuvo DRM cracked in just 10 hours.

While we can debate if piracy hurts game sales all day, according to a EU suppressed 300-page study, piracy doesn’t harm sales all that much. Is it true? I guess that is up for publishers to decide. I will say this though, if Denuvo is suppose to be protecting your games from piracy, its not doing a great job if its being cracked in less than a day. Not to mention the bad word of mouth that Denuvo DRM has, meaning putting the DRM in your game is automatically a bad PR move. If you didn’t already know, Sonic Forces on PC will also be using Denuvo DRM. How long do you think it will take people to crack that?

This whole PC games, DRM and piracy has been a huge issue with publishers. What are your thoughts on Denuvo DRM and SEGA using it for their PC games? Let us know in the comments below.

As you might have seen on the interewebs, people weren’t too keen with SEGA’s decision to put Denuvo DRM in Sonic Mania for PC. I think the biggest insult for people was SEGA not mentioning the unpopular DRM on their store page (later updated), only having people purchase the game before finding out Denuvo was included. While I understand that companies are scared of their games being massively pirated, especially a title like Sonic Mania which is only a mere 300mb in size, they got to understand that there isn’t a DRM in the world that will keep pirates out long term. For example, Tekken 7‘s Denuvo DRM was cracked in just four days.

People are hoping that now that pirates have cracked Sonic Mania‘s Denuvo DRM, that SEGA will remove it just due to its unpopularity and the fact that its not solving the issue it was implemented to solve. This is something that RiME developer, Tequila Works did when their game’s DRM was cracked. While I personally wouldn’t even know if the game had Denuvo DRM or not without the internet telling me, especially now with the offline fix, its just a bad PR move to include it in your game and hope its removed sooner than later. In the last eight days of release, Sonic Mania on PC still hasn’t reached 100k sold on Steam. Its getting close. But to ask you guys, do you guys think Sonic Mania’s Denuvo DRM actually helped the game’s sales in the last 8 days or hurt it? Let me know in the comments below.

Sonic Mania on PC has received a 31.8 MB update that will fix a bug with its Denuvo DRM where you will be able to play offline. According to SEGA it was always mean’t to be played offline which upset people online.

Sonic Mania on PC also didn’t tell people, prior to release, that it used Denuvo Anti-tamper DRM, but they have now updated their steam page now telling users. Personally, SEGA made a bad move going with Denuvo, considering the baggage the DRM has had over the last few years; if they just used something like SteamWorks it would have been a non-story. Personally I have had no issues with Denuvo, but I totally see why people dislike the DRM. What do you think of the whole situation?